I couldn’t vote for Ron Paul: Gingrich

Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, hit by millions in negative TV advertising, it back at opponents Ron Paul and Mitt Romney on Tuesday in the final week of campaigning for Iowa’s Jan. 3 presidential caucuses.

“I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American,” Gingrich said in an interview with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer.

Gingrich said he would not vote for Paul should the libertarian Texas congressman become the Republican nominee, citing “racist, anti-Semitic” comments in newsletters put out by Paul in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Paul has disavowed comments made in the newsletters, saying he did not write such remarks as a description of the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday as “Hate Whitey Day.”

But Gingrich would have none of it, noting Paul’s blitz of anti-Gingrich TV spots.

“He’s attacking me for serial hypoocrisy and he spent 10 years out of earning money off a newsletter that had his name that he didn’t notice,” Gingrich argued.

As to the prospect of Ron Paul in the Oval Office, Gingrich went on:

“As a potential president, a person who thinks the United States was (responsible) for 9/11, a person who believes, who wrote in his newsletter that the WTC bombing in 1993 might have been a CIA plot, the person who says it doesn’t matter if the Iranians have a nuclear weapon — you look at Ron Paul’s record of systematic avoidance of reality, his ads are about as accurate as his newsletter.”

The Iowa race is highly volatile, but one poll was week showed Romney, Paul and Gingrich in a virtual three-way tie. The Paul campaign has mounted a formidable ground game in the Hawkeye State.

Romney

Beginning a 22-stop bus tour, Gingrich took out after Romney: A Romney “SuperPac” has been pummeling Gingrich with a $2 million ad buy.

“He (Romney) is a good manager,” said Gingrich. “He is a competent person. He did very very well with the Winter Olympics, but there is a huge difference between the philosophy of a ‘supply side’ conservative in the (Jack) Kemp-(Ronald) Reagan tradition and the philosophy of a Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich said.

Very rarely has the winner of Iowa’s caucuses gone on to win the Republican nomination. George Bush, Sr., upset Reagan there in 1980. Only Bob Dole and George W. Bush have begun a run to the nomination with a caucus victory.

But Iowa is a “winnowing” state. Six Republican contenders are contesting the caucuses. The standard rule is that there are “three tickets out of Iowa,” meaning it is the end of the line for also-rans.